


Faces of the Moon, or, Five Times Sakura Wasn't There

by Thimblerig



Category: CLAMP - Works, Cardcaptor Sakura
Genre: Amnesia, Backstory, Crimes & Criminals, Disabled Character, Gen, Genre Shift, M/M, Multi, Reincarnation, Setting - 1920s Hong Kong, Setting - 1940s Bletchley Park, Setting - 1970s Tokyo, Setting - Boarding School, Setting - Library
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-24
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2019-08-06 18:34:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 17,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16392956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig
Summary: Sooner or later, a boy and the anthropomorphic personification who works for his little sister have to have The Talk. You know, the one about past lives and honourable intentions.ThatTalk...





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this many years ago, and am porting it over from ff.net. I was a much younger writer, then, but I hope you enjoy.

They walked through the park, a dark young man and a pale angel-thing. The slight breeze stirred the angel's fine pale hair and violet vestments, nudged at the young man's wide-brimmed hat until he clapped it on his head more firmly. Through the green-gold leaves of trees that shaded their path they could see the young man's little sister – the angel-thing's employer – in a frilly sundress and straw hat, surrounded by her school friends, all prowling around a giant stone penguin with butterfly nets earnestly brandished in their hands.

Touya, the dark one, looked at his companion and sighed inwardly. Being friends with the figment of someone else's imagination was... awkward, sometimes. However, Touya wasn't one to be put off by fear, danger, or even awkwardness, and here they were. He asked his question.

"Why?" asked Yue, eventually.

Touya said, "Yuki... dreams at night. I think perhaps he would like to talk to you about this but can't, for obvious reasons."

Yue considered briefly, his cat-slit eyes becoming distant, and then nodded. "It is so."

"Huh," said Touya. "I had wondered about that. You really don't read Yuki's mind all the time."

"I  _am_  his mind," said Yue.

He bent on one knee, gathering his trailing robes about him, and lightly touched a daisy growing in the grass by the path with his fingers. "It is similar to the transmigration of human souls. The flower is not the petal and yet it is. I maintain mental boundaries for both our sakes: Yukito-kun is an earnest and sincere young man, but he would find knowing the exact movements of the sun, the moon, and all the stars, the shadows they cast on this earth, and the energy-trails affected thereby, to be somewhat distressing. It might distract him from his homework," Yue said blandly. "In my turn, I prefer to give the boy privacy, when I can."

Touya grinned in spite of himself. "Really?"

"Nm. It appears the barriers have been weakening while we slept. I will be more careful. To answer your question, Touya-kun, yes, I have had other faces, led other lives. There were candidates that Keroberous might have chosen before Sakura, and I knew them all, in my fashion."

"The plush toy never said."

"Keroberous has his own way of existing." Yue half-smiled, looking through the leaves at his fellow construct Keroberous who, incarnate in the form of a winged lion-cub, snoozed in the wreckage of a picnic basket, the crumpled sweet wrapper that balanced on his nose drifting up and down with each breath.

"He forgets things."

"Until he needs them, yes."

"And you don't," Touya guessed.

"That is correct," said Yue. "Memory is a primary trait. I can alter the consciousness of my facades and other people at will, but never my own, even were I to desire that."

Touya's dark brows furrowed as he recalled one of his little sister's tales. "The forgetting of the Final Judgement."

"That was Clow Reed's magic, not mine."

Touya's eyes narrowed. "It was vicious."

"Clow Reed designed, created, and worked with magical constructs for far longer than you have had existence," said Yue with asperity. "His judgement is not to be questioned in this matter."

"Clow Reed was an ass."

And then they were standing, the dark boy and the pale angelthing, eye to eye, facing off like angry cats. Behind the heat of his anger, Touya was interested to notice that Yue's pale hair was giving off sparks, his carefully draped vestments likewise. Weird. But then, the whole situation was peculiar.

"Do not speak of matters that do not concern you," hissed Yue.

"It concerns me," said Touya, with soft venom, "because it concerned my little sister. It concerned you who are also my friend Yuki. It concerns me because freakish, cock-eyed magic almost lost me the person I care for most, and I would not even remember what I had lost."

The clear summer's day darkened and the heat became muggy and oppressive. Thunder rolled overhead. In the clearing by King Penguin, little Sakura looked up anxiously, "Hoee?"

With visible effort, Yue and Touya relaxed their shoulders and stepped back. "I'm glad that she did not fail," said Touya, eventually.

Yue looked away. "So am I." His white-feathered wings shuffled. "It would have been troublesome, else."

Touya snorted air through his nose again. "You were saying?

Yue hesitated. "The telling may unnerve you."

Touya's stomach churned, remembering the night before – lying on a borrowed futon in rabbity pajamas, listening to a soft voice across the room talking and talking... names, places, times. Yuki talked in his sleep, but when he did, he wasn't Yuki anymore. In the old days, before he'd lent out his power of spiritual sight to help sustain Yue and Yukito, Touya would have just  _known_ what was going on _._ It was a joyous trade, but now he was, frankly, scared. He didn't like it. "Tell me."

Yue settled on the grass, his back against a rough-barked tree, and tapped the daisy again. "I followed the book, always. It was a protection and an energy-reservoir for the cards, Keroberous, and myself to survive on after... after it became necessary for us to find a new Master. Such a thing of power is dangerous to release on the world unchaperoned so at times I would emerge and form a shape in the world of flesh. On occasion Keroberous would also awaken from his slumber, though his priorities were different. Clow Reed had entrusted him with the choosing of a new Master – it was not chance that Sakura found the book when she did.

"In the early years, the book was in the care of the Li family in Hong Kong. After it left their custody, in the nineteen twenties, I became a silver-grey cat, companion to a girl with eyes like pearls. She was blind, and kind to me.

"In the wanderings after, I have emerged to become a codebreaker at Bletchley Park."

"Bletchley what?"

"Working for the British," Yue clarified, "and, still in Britain, I was a librarian in London. Once I was a schoolteacher," he said, rueful reminiscence in his catslit eyes. "There were two candidates that Keroberos was considering then, though I could never fathom why. That was in the late fifties.

"Very little happened after. For thirty years, Keroberous slept and I remained in the human world, taking form after form, waiting for an appropriate candidate to come inside our aegis. Finally, the book moved into Tomoeda township and I became Yukito until Sakura was able to seek the cards and, in time, challenge me for their mastery. That is all."

"Poor you," cooed Touya.

"Boredom is not in my nature. However, the power entrusted to the book was beginning to fade. Keroberous might not have had time to locate another candidate after Sakura."

"You would have died?"

"Don't be absurd, Touya-kun," said Yue, his voice gentle as falling snow. "I am a magical construct. How can I die, when I am only a figment of someone else's imagination?"

He moved to pluck the daisy, but Touya slapped his hand away.

"You're a piece of work, Yue-san."

"Thank you, Touya-kun."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tsukishiro Yukito appears in the story before Sakura opens the book and releases the cards, which means either that Yue had created his false form to be ready if she might open the thing, or that he created false memories in the people around him so that Yukito had "always been there." Either possibility is rather interesting.
> 
> As a heads up, yes, you will meet some of the people from the canon story in the following, just mostly in different lives (it was good enough for Clow, ne?). There's a fair bit of gender-switching, sorry. I figured that Yue was fairly androgynous to begin with and that human souls could go either way (reincarnation is a mysterious thing). Also, my assumption is that Yue would create disguises that would be appealing to any potential candidates (because Clow admits that Yukito was created to be someone Sakura would find adorable) and that different people want different things. Like, um, pet cats. Or extra family members. Sometimes lovers. Ah, just read.


	2. Investigating Stillness 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A blind girl in an attic befriends a cat; the Guardian of the Moon refuses to speak.

Hong Kong: Fragrant Harbour. Named for the ancient shipping port on an island in front of the Pearl River Delta, where spices and cedar and sandalwood were brought from distant places, and for the families of incense-grinders that once took up their quiet trade there. By 1927 it is a noisy city – the ships in the harbour coal-stinking behemoths, the wards of the city crowded with foreigners, and shiny black motorcars jostle with carried chairs and new-fangled wheeled rickshaws in the streets.

In the noisy city, in a noisy house, there is a quiet room, dark, where the shutters are never opened, and lamps seldom lit. Bolts of brocade and stolen silk share space with boxes of neatly packed opium, broken clockwork, soapstone idols, and strips of imported baseball cards. A charcoal brazier burns softly over a tray of sand in the corner. On a high shelf ticks a clock, old and battered, its wooden frame scarred by fire.

One table is very neat, covered with two mortars, a cutting board, a knife, and mixing bowls set in a rigid pattern. One high-backed chair is occupied by a small girl. She sits very still, and listens to the clock.

_Day 1._

When the clock chimed a musical quarter-to-six, the girl got up from the chair and, drawing her too-long brocade robes and swags of tangled black hair about her, trotted to the brazier, moving surely in the near-total darkness. She lit a twist of paper from the glowing coals and lit the oil-soaked wick of a lamp, holding one hand close to the wick and listening to tell if it had caught. She nodded in satisfaction and lowered the glass chimney of the lamp. She put more charcoal on her fire, and set an iron kettle over it.

At just after six, by the chiming of the clock, the walls vibrated from the sound of heavy boots in the corridor outside. Voices rose up – heavy, male, raucous. "Oi, Tou, come on and drink. You only got one life, you know!" and a response, a little quieter, "Nah, gotta count my money. There's a girl I'm saving up for, yeah?" Laughter, then more quiet.

A key turned, and the door opened. The girl jumped up from the brazier, her hair sliding over her shoulders, and trotted to the door. A hand on her head stopped her at the same as something rigid and heavy fell to the ground and half landed on her foot, making her yelp. Large rough hands patted all over her as the door slammed shut.

Meihua held still, but wrinkled her nose. "What are you doing, Older Brother?"

"Hair," her brother answered worriedly. "On fire. What were you thinking?" Indeed, she could feel heat on her clothes now, and there was a scorched smell rising up from her clothes, starting to make her stomach turn. Her brother sighed finally, and stopped. "It's all gone now."

"Oh," said Meihua. She put her hands on his shoulders and let him pick her up properly. She breathed in the scents coming off his heavy duffel coat and spun-hemp shirt – wind and tobacco, alcohol, petrol, traces of sweet opium, something salty and dark.

"You should be more careful!" her brother said, then, "I'll bind up your hair for you."

Meihua rested her head on his shoulder. The coat was warm and wet there – she fingered the shirt underneath, fingered a tear, and said nothing. "Ah," said her brother. "Well, you see, I was in the middle of a delivery job – it was cans of milk – and then I tripped when I got to the restaurant but it was okay. Only soup got spilled. On my shoulder. And then when we were trying to clean it up, the shirt got ripped up. By accident. But it's just fine!"

"I see," she said quietly, and felt him wince very softly. "If you put me down," she said, more cheerfully, "I will wash your feet." Her brother relaxed, and sat down in the chair while Meihua set about with a basin of warm water. When she was done, she handed him a clean shirt and some rags and lint – to clean off the soup – and busied herself at the other end of the room, pretending not to hear him hiss as he cleaned out a gash on his shoulder.

Then it was her turn to lean against the trellised back of the chair, while he prodded her tangled hair with a comb and asked whatever she did all day to tangle it. "I talk with the milkweed fairies," she said gravely, "and they tell me stories. Did you bring me any presents?"

Her brother's voice brightened and he pulled paper-wrapped packages from his duffel coat. "Here's cowrie shells, and cinnamon bark, and a block of sandalwood. The amber was hard but I found these lumps strung on a necklace. Okay?"

Meihua sniffed it. "It's glass," she said. She heard clothing rustle as he winced again. She ruffled his hair and giggled as he ducked to protect his scalp, mortified. "What's in the crate?"

Her brother whacked heavy dust off the crate before pushing it over to his sister who bubbled quietly but happily as she explored the rough wooden sides of the crate with her hands. "It is so much fun to guess, Older Brother," she said, tapping it and feeling for the opening. "Is there a present for me inside? Maybe just a little one?" There were heavy wax seals around the opening, with twirly dents from the chop. They felt warm to her hands.

"Oh, uh, well, we'll have to open it and find out, Little Sister," he said, scratching his head. "There might be a little something I picked up while I was, uh, bargaining for goods. You never know 'til you look – uh, find out."

Meihua ignored him and pressed her ear to the crate, rocking it a little. She cracked a seal. A tiny mew came from inside. Meihua sat up straight, shocked. "How long has it been trapped there?"

"Oh! Uh, sorry," he said, dejectedly. "Um, well, I didn't think." He grabbed up a crowbar and jimmied open the lid from the other side, avoiding his little sister's small hands. It came open and a silver-grey cat with the long lines of a Siamese eeled out from under the lid, scrambled over a teetering pile of boxes, and shot under the divan bed at the far side of the room. "Bad cat!" He knelt by the divan and peered dubiously underneath. It growled. "Here, you, be more polite," he admonished and reached one brawny arm underneath. "Beats me where you came from," he muttered under his breath. The cat scratched him.

"Let it be, Older Brother," Meihua said gravely. "We shall be introduced later."

Tou sucked at the scratch, sat back on his feet, and looked at the rest of the contents of the crate he'd... obtained. A small round mirror with an enamelled red border. A stack of rice paper written with elegant calligraphy. A bundle of envelopes bound with blue ribbon, addressed in flowing Western-style writing. Three carved ivory combs. A heavy book, bound in red leather, with a golden, winged lion embossed on the front, and a lock. It might be worth something. He gave the combs to his little sister.

Later, there was food – hot steaming rice with snowpeas and green onions, and Tou read to his sister from  _The Jungle Book_ , because she liked to hear about wolves running under the moon. He bent his head under the divan and scolded the cat to come out and be nice to his sister, but it growled at him. It was against his dignity to growl back.

Later, when he had gone away, and the walls of the room vibrated with rhythmic noises and voices coming from the rooms beyond, Meihua released the ties from her hair so that it fell loose and free. She sat up from the bed-clothes, and leant over the edge of her divan-bed. "Hello," she said.

"Older Brother thinks that you should be a cat who will sleep on my lap, and purr, and make me happy. I do not think you are like that. That is alright. You do not need to be happy to please me – I am sorry," she said, her level eyebrows wrinkling in distress over blind eyes, "that did not come out right. How do I say - if you do not choose to be affectionate, I will not be offended."

There was no sound from under the divan. She turned her head to the deepest area of silence and said, "Falling snow is not affectionate, or happy, but it pleases just by being what it is. Ah!" she said, smiling. "May I call you Xue Fang? Fragrant Snow? If you do not want, please say so now." There was silence again. She giggled a little. "Xue Fang it is." The blood was falling in her head. "Good night, Xue Fang."

That night, Meihua did not dream of sunlit gardens, or her mother cooking, or lessons, as she normally did. She did not dream of fire. There was someone talking, in a strange voice that shifted from a booming growl to small and plaintive in mid-sentence and back again.  _Well, that was a nap and a half I say. Yue, can you hear me? If you're there, some discussion of where we landed would be handy. Yue? It's hard to move in here, I feel like I'm wearing a hobble. Oomph, ech. Yowzer! Aaaaahhh, that's better. I'll get the hang of this in no time! Look, old son, the boss had his reasons, right? Who are we to argue if he doesn't wan- The boss had his reasons, do you hear me? I miss him too. Yue? Answer me, please..._

_(to be continued)_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _strips of imported baseball cards_ \- According to A Brief History of Baseball Cards (., retrieved 2 July, 2008), baseball cards were around as early as the 1840s, though in a slightly different form. In the 1920s, they came in perforated strips. I have no evidence suggesting that they were in Hong Kong, but I don't have any reason to think they weren't in a cosmopolitan port either. Something for Tou to be trading on the blackmarket.
> 
> //Always fun playing with names and the meanings thereof. In this case, 'Meihua' uses the characters for Beautiful Rose, and 'Tou' is Peach, after the peaches of immortality. It is entirely consistent for the pair to address each other solely by their position in the family. 'Xue Fang' is explained in the story.
> 
> //She ruffled his hair... Probably shouldn't have, actually, being younger and female and all. I s'pect those two have been living alone long enough to develop their own protocols.


	3. Investigating Stillness 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The older brother hides his words; the lion in the hidden book seeks conversation!

_Day 7_

_"The lion-eating poet in the stone corner,"_ Tou declaimed. "See? I'm not drunk. Not drunk at all." He drained another cup of gingery wine and blinked as the crowd of sailors, labourers, and itinerant loafers blurred in front of him. But that was only the smoke, both acrid and sweet, hazing up to the heavy-rafter ceiling of the public room.

The European who sat in front of him, in the black coat with the shiny buttons, laughed behind his neat blond beard, and wrinkles formed around his bright eyes. "I have no idea what you just said, my friend.  _Shi shi shi shi shi?"_

"Is Chinese!" roared Tou. "The wisdom of the inscrutable East!  _Shi_  is  _shi_. Is lion, is poet, is four, is lots of things. "You just say differently," he said, gesturing with a hand to mimic the intonations of the syllables. "Sing it."

The European's eyes twinkled. "The stone poet in the dead lion," he tried, then, "Forty-four corners die. The lion eats stones." He shrugged, and folded his short, blunt hands on the table, where the stones in his rings twinkled. "I am not as articulate as you, my friend."

This was a great guy, considered Tou, but he thought too little of himself: Tou clapped him on the shoulder and said, "You can be articulate if you try. Even the greatest sage started with  _baba_  and  _mama_. It is truth." Somewhere in the warmth of the ginger wine, the thought drifted up that perhaps Tou should not be using words like 'articulate' in common conversation - not in his milk tongue, not talking in a foreign language either, however unlikely he was to meet this nice guy again. Oh. Maybe he  _was_  drunk. He let out a huge belch to kind of cover things up, but the European was looking down at the wares on the table again.

There was an eclectic spread: piles of rough amethyst, scraps of jade for stringing around children's necks on red cord, golden chains, a little soapstone icon that looked like Buddha with a topknot and big feet, two fine daggers, the blades wavy from the folding of the steel, a knot of bright silk scarves, a bundle of baseball cards, and a box of mugwort moxibustion needles. The European shifted the two knives, the scarves, and the cards to his side of the table, poked dismissively at the stones, and considered gravely the moxibustion needles and a box of sticky black bricks half hidden by the other merchandise.

"I'm really looking for incense," he admitted.

Tou twitched. "I don't have that," he said at last, the cold wave of sobriety washing over him, "just the medicinals," pointing at the moxibustion needles. Wait - did he just say 'medicinals'? "There's a shop around the corner, set you up real nice."

"I've been there," said the European mildly, "and to Mama Chen's. Neither had what I was looking for."

Tou shrugged sadly. "Then I cannot help. I don't know incense. Just a dumb coolie, yeah?"

"Ah, so," said the European, rubbing his chin. "Such a pity! I would pay good money for..." he pronounced the Cantonese words carefully, "'Walking Heaven' incense?"

Tou shrugged, making his face impassive. "I don't know incense." Though the public room was a warm haven against the winter chill outside, and he really needed to make a sale, he really wanted to be somewhere else right now. Across the room, the band came back from their break, and a woman in a red dress started singing warm contralto songs.

"They don't make that stuff any more," a light and breathless voice said over Tou's right shoulder. It was young Wang Yan Tao, the son of a clerk and proud of his English when he slummed it down here, proud enough to eavesdrop and to interrupt, and he was going to get himself in trouble one day - maybe this one. Tou glared at him, but the boy went on, "There was only the one family that could do it, up on the Hill, but they died.  _They say_ " he added brightly, "that it was not just the Triads who burned them out, but the very gods of Hell wanted them gone." Tou didn't move.

"My," said the European, bright eyes wide, that's a tall order. "Whatever did they do to warrant such a reception?"

"Changed fate," came another voice, coming warm and mellow from Tou's left. He saw with gratitude his friend Li, blinking gentle eyes behind tiny round glasses, set in a plump brown face.

"Kid," said Li, dropping his hand on the Wang Yan Tao's shoulder, "the men are doing business." The boy looked like a puppy who'd been rapped on the nose, but Li smiled gently and added, "See you tonight, the usual," and Wang Yan Tao brightened as he hurried away. Li blew on his hands, still in fingerless gloves from the outside chill, and folded back his coat. "And you," he smiled at Tou. He nodded courteously to the European, and wended his way to the bar.

 

**

 

In her quiet room, Meihua stood on a wooden stool in front of her worktable. She had just finished grinding the fragments of seasoned sandalwood and tested the consistency of the powder with her fingers. It was fine and even, and just a little coarse against her skin. The smell rose, rich and aromatic. She dusted her fingers, and used a small, deep-bellied spoon to add careful quantities to the mix curing in a great stone bowl, and folded it all together with a china spatula.

"I think that I am getting better at this," she said to the silent cat, or the empty air - whichever was true. "I am still not as good as Mama, but I am getting better. My nose has more patience now.

"Do you want to know what I am doing, Xue Fang?" she asked. "I am making incense! It is for health, and for offering at temples, because Buddha likes it I think, and because it smells nice." She dimpled. "Maybe that is why Buddha likes it." She fumbled open a paper-wrapped package and drew her head back suddenly. "Oh my," she said, "these shells smell very fishy. Did Big Brother pick them up off the beach?" She picked one out, feeling the texture under her fingers - ridged and a little rough on one side, slippery smooth on the other - hopped off her stool, and walked to the divan bed. "Would you like to smell?" She knelt and offered the shell into the darkness underneath the bed. Something rustled and shifted underneath. Meihua held very still, and waited, but no soft nose came up to sniff her hand or the shell. She bobbed her head, finally, and returned to her table.

She dropped the shells in a bowl of fresh water to soak. "I don't need these for five more days, so we have time," she said, then, "You want to know what I am talking about, Xue Fang, or at least or I imagine you do, which is enough for now.

"This is very difficult incense to make," she explained. "It takes 108 days and the ingredients need to be added on proper days, to season together, and because the auspices work that way. I had to get Big Brother to chart the  _feng shui_  for me, because the hills and waterways are very different from where we used to live. Then I had to think through the changes to the recipe and work out the horoscopes, which wasn't difficult but it was tricky because I didn't have Mama's manuals anymore. I don't think Big Brother could sit still long enough to do that." She giggled. "He's very sweet, and smarter than he thinks he is, but he prefers to be  _doing_  things.

"And he is a terrible liar, Xue Fang."

She yawned. "It's time for sleeping. You know, Xue Fang," she said quietly as she pulled up the bed-covers, "if you ate or drank, I wouldn't think less of you at all. I promise."

 

**

 

"Did the incense really grant wishes?" asked Li, burying his hands in his pockets as they walked along the harbour.

"I can't make the stuff," grunted Tou. "I never had the knack for that sort of thing." In the water, the grey steamships bulked large amid the smaller ships and junks and houseboats, like elephants crowding the other beasts out of a waterhole. The water was filthy - Tou wrinkled his nose as a bit of rotting cabbage drifted by in the dark water.

"I didn't ask if you could make it," Li said mildly, "I asked if it really worked. Something I had to wish for wouldn't truly be mine, now would it?"

Tou said nothing, and they wended their way to a more affluent part of town, and slipped through a side gate into a large family compound. The gate-keeper scowled at Li, but he beamed back happily and said, "The festival's only two weeks away. We have to practice when we can."

The kid, Wang Yan Tao, and his friend Chen Courageous Learning were already waiting in a dimly lit courtyard fringed with wisteria, wearing fluffy trousers and holding the gaudy mirrored heads of lion costumes. Li beamed. "Are you feeling your lionish heart?"

 _"Rowwr,"_ said Tou.

 

**

 

Meihua dreamed that night, of being held in strong arms like her brother held her. The wind was bitter and pulled at her hair and clothes, and she heard the ruffling sound of wings moving somewhere. No-one spoke. But when a cool hand was pressed against her eyes, somehow she could see all the lights of the city below, and all the stars of a clear chilly night.

Then the dream changed, and she was lying in the dark listening to a growly-boomy voice speak on and on:

_I have to believe you are the cat, because, because I just have to. I don't want Yue to be gone for good, so you're just you, alright? Stop licking yourself, it's disgusting. I have your attention, now? Well good. At least your eyes are the same. Confound it, stop batting at me. I am not a toy, blasted kitty, and you'll scratch my finish._

_So. Somehow you got out of the book. Telling me how would be dandy, so I could help you out with the Guarding thing. Telling me anything at all would - ah, let's not go there again. So I'm supposed to pick a new master, huh? Tough call. I think I'll wait a bit._

_There was a story about a bookmark that turned into a beautiful woman. How did she stand being stuck in a book before someone found her?_

_How do you wait, Yue?_

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _Shi is shi..._ - Shi is also the verb 'to be', or 'is', in at least one dialect of Chinese. That conversation could have gotten incredibly confusing if they weren't talking English.
> 
> // _moxibustion needles..._ \- Moxibustion involves burning mugwort very close to what are generally considered acupuncture points (moxibustion is probably the older technique). Sometimes the mugwort is on a stick, held close to the point, formed into a cone burned directly on the skin, sometimes in a little ball on an acupuncture needle. This last is what Tou is selling.
> 
> // All I know of making incense I got out of books and the Internet (because the Internet never lies ^_^) The stuff about waiting for auspicious days I made up, but it does need to season, and I have encountered recipes with cowrie shells in them.
> 
> // So I was reading up on Lion Dances, and apparently back in the day the dancers often had links with gangs and such. I'm not sure if the reputation still holds. They appear at festivals, and in some styles the heads have horns and mirrors on their foreheads. I'll put up better references in the next chapter.
> 
> // _Confound it..._  This is before Keroberous acquired his slangy Osakan accent. For the purposes of indicating the difference, I ended up with an Englishy feel. Clow Reed was half-English - I don't think I'm messing with canon too much.


	4. Investigating Stillness 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pretty sure I mentioned this was tragedy...

_Day 14_

Because Li was small and plump and as bouncy as a rubber ball the back half of their lion twitched and wagged its tail in double time as they trotted across the night-struck courtyard. Tou fumbled with the levers that blinked the lion's long-lashed eyes and cursed the tiny vision slits in the mask. Mostly, in the dark courtyard they practiced in, he remembered where the walls were and danced as if he were blind, guessing where the other beast was on instinct. He jumped and stamped his feet, cursed again when the back-end went the wrong way, and then rubbed up against Wang and Chen's beast in what he hoped was a flirtatious manner. At least he and Li weren't playing the  _girl_  lion.

Enough courtship! Tou bounced away and led the other lion into a game of lion-tag that only looked playful and improvised – they had been working on this routine for months, for the new year's street festival. They practiced 'picking the cabbage' that dangled twenty feet up and nipping the little envelope of money hidden inside, and rolling on big starry balls – Wang and Chen with grim concentration, Tou and Li's lion with a waggle to the tail that looked like they were constantly about to fall off. Sometimes they did. No doubt Li thought it was hilarious, but after the fourth painful tumble Tou was just glad that it was the middle of the night and all of the people in Li's family compound were asleep right now. They never laughed, was the problem: a vision of Old Man Li grimly correcting Tou's slapstick technique floated before his eyes and he shuddered briefly.

After hours of work, when sweat slicked their bodies even in the chill of the winter night, Tou and Chen shucked off their lion-skin and, leaving the other two to practice, disappeared through the back door of a tile-roofed warehouse next to their practice courtyard. Wang and Chen ignored them: it was business as usual.

 

_Day 17_

"I'm home!" Tou looked suspiciously around the golden-lit room. It was missing a pair of sullen, obsessive eyes watching his sister. "Where's the cat?"

His sister continued grinding resin, sometimes dipping her mortar in a dish of ice water to keep it cool in the brazier fueled warmth of their room. "Xue Fang is visiting the neighbours."

Tou's eyes widened and he was across the room in an instant. "You didn't let it out? You didn't open the window while I was away?"

"No," she answered serenely, and gestured gently upwards to the matting that was their ceiling. "Xue Fang is visiting the People That Live Upabove."

Tou peered upwards. In the shadows of one corner, there might be a trailing edge of matting leaving a hole that an agile beast could get up to. He noted with growing horror the hanging bulge in the matting, moving ever faster as the upabove squeaks and rustles that Tou never listened to anymore grew quietly more frantic. He noted the frayed patch in the centre of the ceiling. He saw the bulge divide into four that moved with savage speed over the frayed patch, which gave way, and he dived frantically to catch a fanged, clawed, and bloodied ferocious thrice-damned  _devil_  before it landed on something breakable, like his sister. It was at that point that Tou tripped on an edge of carpet.

When his head stopped ringing, Tou found himself spread-eagled on the floor, with a wild-eyed eyed scrawny beast digging into his chest with a lot very sharp and bloody claws. He looked at the cat; the cat looked back at him. It chewed experimentally at the half-alive black rat twitching feebling in its jaws. "It's looking at me!" said Tou. A mouse fell on his head and the cat grabbed for it with a razor-clawed paw.

"Ah, you two are becoming such good friends!"

The cat leaped hysterically off Tou's chest and disappeared under the bed, where it divided its time between growling, purring, crunching at living things, and staring out into the world. "I hate you," said Tou, but very quietly, because his sister was laughing, truly laughing, with a soft husky chuckle that he had almost forgotten.

 

_Day 20_

Li shinned up to the next tier of shelves in the warehouse, set up a spirit burner, and began going through the boxes, taking off the wax seals of each one with a knife heated in the flame and sorting the contents methodically before resealing it. Tou, in a rough seaman's jersey over his fluffy lion trousers, was keeping watch, clutching the lantern in one hand and a red-tasselled spear in the other. In this warehouse were...  _things_  which he did not like, shadows which skittered at the corners of his eyes and whispering voices, and boxes he hated to touch hidden among the bolts of embroidered cloth, badger-formed tea-kettles, the racks of books and scrolls.

"Why do you steal from your family?"

"Eh?" Li poked his head over the shelf. "You're asking me this now?"

"You're an elder son," Tou clarified. "They'd give it to you if you asked."

Li sighed, and resettled his little round glasses on his nose. "If it has to be given, how can it ever truly be mine?"

Tou's thick eyebrows furrowed together.

"To put it another way, I prefer to show initiative to prove that I am worthy of my position of seniority in the family. I want to know what's actually  _in_  here. (And if Clow Reed really did put a cataclysm in a box)," he muttered.

"Eh?"

"I said, I'm looking for where they put Clow Reed's personal effects in a box," Li called down, smiling. "Some of the more personal letters might be better off sent to their writers. But I cannot find anything with the right chop on the box, and I  _know_  that no crates have left here. It's all very frustrating. You're frowning again."

"But... you gave me a crate three weeks ago."

"I'm fairly certain I'd remember doing something like that," Li said. He tumbled a mass of scarlet silk on Tou's head. "Here, for that girl you're saving up for."

Tou sputtered and fumbled to get his head free from the material trying to drown him. When he did, there was a scratch on his face from a hitherto unnoticed pin, slowly oozing droplets of blood.

"Oh, hey," said Li, reaching down and very gently brushing away the blood with a scrap of cloth. He pressed the bloodied cloth against the golden lock of a rough wooden box and it rang like a bell and sprang open. "Waste not, want not." But there were only jewels inside.

 

_Day 21_

Firecrackers were exploding outside. Meihua got up from their platter of sweet  _nian gao_  cakes and trotted to the shutters. She felt with her fingers for the crack between them, where the icy wild air seeped in, and leant her forehead against it. She quoted softly,

 _Before my bed, the moon is shining bright,_  
_I think that it is frost upon the ground._  
_I raise my head and look at the bright moon,_  
_I lower my head and think of home._

There was a soft sound behind her. She put out a hand and felt her brother's face: the harsh stubble on his broad cheek was wet. She caught the tears from his eyes with an ivory spoon. "Thank you, Older Brother."

He flinched.

That night Meihua dreamed of fire again, and falling white feathers. She dreamed a small growling voice was talking at her, endlessly coaxing her to open a book, any book, and she had tell it, over and over, that she couldn't read any more. She dreamed that a lion took off his mask and became her brother, tired and anxious and bewilderedly kind. She dreamed she was flying over the brightly-lit city. And when she woke up she was still in the dark, and Xue Fang was sniffing at her forehead.

 

_Day 22_

Tou trotted along the wharves, exhausted in every muscle of his body, a lion head wrapped in linen in his arms. Beside him trotted his friend Li, and a little behind were Wang and Chen, drooping yet very happy. Li was planning out what their lion-dance troupe would do for the next festival.

"Say two weeks rest, and then we'll be back practicing at the usual place." He whacked Tou lightly on the shoulder. "It'll be  _fine_. Don't I look after you – as much as you'll let me? Stick with me, and it will all be alright."

 

_Day 68_

The European found him on the docks, looking up at the big ocean-going ships and clapped him on the shoulder. "I'd never lived 'til I trod the ocean, my friend."

Tou looked at the man, smiling behind his sandy beard. Tou shrugged.

"If you want to go, just  _go_ ," said the European. "Don't worry about buying a ticket, I can find a berth for another stoker any day. Or forget about that funny incense, I've got fetching and carrying work about town that needs a reliable fetcher and carrier, if you take my meaning. Under the table but good wages, all right and tight."

 

_Day 77_

Meihua is working at her table, sprinkling another layer of ground spice into her mix. Her brother is not here, but he had carefully explained that he would be away for three days, three days exactly, so she does not worry. Instead, she explains what she is doing to the cat, who is lurking on her worktable, just out of touching range. Xue Fang has a knack for being close without interfering with her work, which she appreciates.

"I need to balance all the influences, but not," she says quietly. "Mama said, 'It is not standing still. It is not waiting to breathe. It is being with one foot raised, about to step forward.' That is what Mama said." She hears footsteps in the hall outside, and smiles as she scatters drops from a small silver flask into the mix.

"He does not know what I wish for, my brother," she says. And, "We are buried in the earth of Maya, putting out flower-heads with the seasons. But the Wheel turns; Heaven walks. In this life or the next, Xue Fang, everything will definitely be alright.

 

_Day 100_

In a quiet room in a noisy house, a little girl is sitting, still as the hub of a wheel. There is a stack of books beside her which she has never read. She fingers the cover of the top one – when she traces the lion embossed on it the metal makes her fingers tingle. In the brooding summer heat she waits, for the rich dark incense she has bound with resin to cure, for the cat that snores fitfully by her feet to wake, for her brother to return.

The fire-stained clock chimes six o'clock. He never comes.

 

_Day 108_

There is a small pile of animal corpses in front of her now. Most of them are dead, though two still clench and unclench their feet in a last flicker of vitality. The cat pushes them forward with his nose so that they twitch against the blind girl's hand. She ignores them. On the table beside her is an iron bowl filled with dark sticky pellets set over cold charcoal bricks. In her hands is a small metal lighter, and she twitches at it, striking sparks from the flint which scatter across her lap and then die.

The cat starts to yowl, a low, eerie sound more felt than heard: someone is pounding on the door.

The clock strikes six.

 

_Day 109_

_Yue, where are we now? It's dark; we're moving. Our people are gone. Yue, are you there?_

_Yue?_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // I had a Salvage Cat of my own; he was nothing like Xue Fang, except that he also could intimidate flatmates and was a little obsessive. Oh, and he crunched down small furry things, but he always killed them first. Just if people were wondering. Damn, but I miss that zombie.
> 
> // _He is visiting the People That Live Upabove_ - So you put tightly woven straw mats over the rafters to keep the drafts out, and then the rats move in and rustle. So long as the mats don't give way, everybody's happy. The flowery name comes from _The Dragons Backbone: Portraits of Chengdu people in the 1920s_  (Yu Zidan, annotated by William Sewell). Also mentioned in a Kipling story. (There was a corpse, too.) My, these notes are getting long.
> 
> // _...a cataclysm in a box_ - Li Syaoran, soon after he appeared in canon, quoted Li family lore that a 'great evil' could befall the world when the seal on the Cards was broken with no further details. I'm not surprised that they wanted to keep the Cards in the family.
> 
> // _I'm fairly certain I'd remember..._ - In case that tediously expository conversation didn't make it clear, Yue-the-cat blanked out Li's memories of handling the box because he wanted out of the warehouse and that was the simplest way to do it. And I don't think he liked Li too much either. Go figure.
> 
> // _Before my bed..._ - One of the classics, "Thoughts on a Still Night" by Li Po/Li Bai, 8th century. I don't know the translator. The person who first taught it to me stressed that in Chinese poetry the full moon is indicative of family.
> 
> // _caught the tears from his eyes..._ Totally ripped from a scene in Barbara Hambly's Dragonshadow.
> 
> // _Maya_ - "the deluding or illusive power of the world; illusion by which the world is seen as separate from the ultimate singular Reality" (from www . yogajournal lifestyle/ 159?print=1)
> 
> // _everything will definitely be alright._ - In Japanese, that would be zettai daijoubu da yo!, if anyone's interested. :-) (I think I just earned myself another ticket to CCS!fandom hell.)


	5. Interlude, With Foxes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _this never happened_

_Tokyo, 1971_

 

Osaka Joe, Psychic Detective, set down the nubbly brown drinking bowl on the table, his mouth still bitter from the contents, and looked up at his host. The tall woman's stern, narrow face seemed to crumble and slip, as if she had been wearing a mask whose string had snapped. She shook her head and her black coiffure tumbled out of its bell-adorned pins. She hiked up the chrysanthemum-flower skirt of her robe and a tawny-russet tail swung down and swished dangerously.

Osaka Joe smiled, picked up his fedora hat and carefully put it on his head, rose from his cushion, bowed politely, and pelted through the low doorway of the half-ruined house.  _"Kero-kuuuun,"_  he shouted, "the diversion is  _oooooooovvveer."_  There was no answer. Osaka hopped swearing through the grass and prickles in his stocking feet, looked left, looked right, took a wild guess as to the best way, and ran.

Behind him the woman dropped to all fours and began to lope, her flashing white limbs growing fur and her face lengthening around sharp white teeth and a lolloping red tongue. She grinned as she ran, and yipped:  _"Yi-ki-ki-ki-kiiii."_  Around her, from hidden burrows and crannies in the ruins smaller beasts appeared, a wild fierce light in their yellow beast-eyes.

Osaka stumbled across a dry-mountain-water garden, trampling through sandy 'waves' raked only by the wind and scattered with dead leaves and live thistles. The yipping grew louder as the horde of foxes, small and large, came in sight. Osaka thrust a hand inside the battered leather satchel slung over his shoulder and threw a handful of smoke bombs behind him, then retrieved an eerily cold card from a silk-wrapped packet. He performed hand mudras with the rapid grace of long practice, kissed the card for luck, and soon the tiny fairy Sweet emerged, throwing handfuls of cloying perfume around her. Osaka almost lost his way, tear-blind in the choking smoke, but kept going, leaping from mossy rock to mossy rock, away from the disgusted coughing and swearing of the court of foxes, away from his irate pursuers and towards the high wall that bounded their territory.

Osaka skidded to a halt at the wall. A figure stood upon it, black against the sun, a silhouette of loose dark clothes and short, wind-stirred hair, balancing easily on the sloping tiles.

"Looking for something?"

"Eheh," said the detective. "Five featureless grey rocks?"

The person on the wall held up an embroidered bag, its scarlet cords wound about plump white fingers. "You mean  _these_  featureless grey rocks?"

Behind him, the foxes yipped.

"I don't suppose you could let me up, Odango- _han?"_

The small, plump woman stiffened, green eyes narrowing in a round white face. " _Shenme?_  I do not know that word. Is 'odango' a foodstuff? Can you show me in a dictionary?"

Osaka winced. "Jade Platter- _san,_ I would appreciate it very much if you would help me up, or at least let me pass, if you please." He spared a glance behind him and looked back up, his bright black eyes becoming intent. His voice deepened to a mellowness belied by his small frame. "I could make it worth your while. Later this evening... if you know what I mean."

Jade Platter plucked a loose tile from the slanting top of the wall and shied it over Osaka's head. The lump of green-glazed clay hit the rank ground and bounced up into the lead fox's nose, who recoiled swearing. It delayed the other beasts, but only for a moment.

"Do tell."

Osaka almost purred. "There could be... curry."

"Ah." Jade Platter indicated polite interest. "With salmon?"

Osaka seized his hat and threw it on the ground. "Ngghh! Don't you know how much fresh salmon costs? Think of the budget!"

"The budget will extend this week. I, your Honourable Secretary, will make it so," Jade Platter said, with an air that indicated baseball bats used in an unorthodox manner if it didn't. She shied another tile.

"Oh, well then." He picked up his hat, set it at a rakish angle, and took the hand she offered, using the leverage to clamber up. He swayed, briefly dizzy at the differing prospects: on his left was a mess of fog, tumbled walls, and wilderness inhabited by angry foxes, on his right a busy city street where the sun glared off the cars passing and crowds of pedestrians walked by in contented oblivion.

"Eheh, why aren't you with the car?"

Jade Platter looked blank. "Older Brother Keroberous is better at cornering."

A gaudy red convertible swerved around a street-cleaning truck and screeched to a halt below them. At the wheel, a small, yellow, animate toy adjusted dark glasses below his own fedora hat. "Hop in, Boss!" The tiny Sweet fairy fluttered high overhead, whistled something incomprehensible, then dived to fold herself back inside her Clow card with a last puff of intoxicating fragrance.

Osaka Joe bowed to the snarling foxes one last time. "I'm terribly sorry for inconveniencing you, ladies. But they belong in a temple!"

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _dry-mountain-water garden_  - You know – a zen garden. Supposed to be carefully raked.
> 
> // _odango-han_  - An odango is a steamed bun stuffed with meat. I wouldn't enjoy it as a nickname either. -han, if I didn't screw up, is the Kansai-ben variant of -chan, an honorific indicating endearment and cuteness. If I did screw up, call it a personal affectation on Osaka's part.
> 
> // _"Shenme?"_  - "What?"
> 
> // _five featureless gray rocks_  - Nicked from Order of the Stick


	6. Enigma 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the rule is, no character is itself

_bletchley park, 1942, a codebreaker's hut_

 

They came in low through the tunnel, a sheaf of papers in a shallow wooden tray. Sgt. Tommy Archer picked them out of the box, squared them by tapping them on his desk, and glowered at the top page.

Written in a careful round hand in black ink was:

_St Jean le Peu?_

_J wants to know, "Sounds like some piano is escaping," 17 across._

Tommy scrubbed his short black hair furiously then scrawled an answer with his lead pencil:

_Village near Tarrascon, pub Marie et Marthe. Barmaids Madeleine, Oceane, Susanne. Three roads, one close to big highway. More information?_

_And Julian can answer his own bleeding crossword._

He put the sheet back in the box, and shoved it back through the tunnel with the broomstick that leaned against the wall. An answer came back in half an hour, in florid, curling script in vivid blue ink:

_Barmaids did the trick._

_Ta._

_Decrypt to come from Bombe room._

_"As the angel changes angles," 5 down._

_J wants to know, can you take his place for tennis? Twisted ankle._

Tommy answered:

_Sorry about Jacinth's ankle but DON'T DO TENNIS. Or crosswords. How about soccer? Working now._

and got back to the serious business of squinting over maps in Hut 6. Before he'd transferred from his regiment to Bletchley Park, he'd had some vague idea of academic boffins soberly poring over great tomes of abstruse cryptographic technique, when they weren't puffing briar pipes while wrapped in smoking jackets and slippers and listening to Mozart. He'd expected...  _gravitas_  (Oh G-d, the crosswords were rubbing off.) Instead, he got paper darts, terrible coffee, and a crowd of mild-mannered but definitely eccentric people who pestered him for cribs from his knowledge of the French countryside and played rounders at lunch break, every day, with more seriousness than they seemed to apply to the codes.

The box came back, with a single scrap of paper, in the careful round black script:

_My ankles are in quite good health, thank you very much - J is a d-ed liar. Will work on the soccer side anyway. Darts?_

He answered:  _At the Mary Red, half eight. I have dinner with a pretty girl first._

Then there were the Glasscastle twins, two tow-headed Welshman with public-school drawls, who seemed determined to drag him into one weird game after another, apparently because he could actually tell them apart. Darts made a good compromise.

 

**

 

_later that night_

 

It was stew, big savoury chunks of meat floating in a warm mess of beans, cabbage, dumplings, and gravy.

Tommy frowned at the pretty girl he was having dinner with. "We were out of meat ration for the month, you said."

She smiled at him from across the scrubbed table, showing a missing front tooth. Tessa had changed the ribbons on her braids for dinner, though the flower-print of her cotton dress showed some spatters from the cooking. "We did!" his eight-year-old sister said proudly, the glass of her horn-rimmed spectacles catching the light.

"Ah," he said, and lifted the spoon. "You've put oregano in it, nice. I can't quite recognise the taste, mind. Is it rabbit?"

"Something like that. Mrs Pushkin is helping with recipes and that." Tessa grinned her gap-toothed smile again. She was going to break hearts when she hit puberty. Tommy vowed to be there with a big stick, just in case.

 

**

 

 _even_ _later..._

 

"Still alone, I see," said a rangy Welshman with a public-school drawl, as he leaned, arms crossed, against the wall of the ancient public house.

"Nah," said Tommy easily. "I got family, see?"

"I believe," said Glasscastle, looking out into the dark, "that if through some miracle your image of perfection appeared before you, you'd tell it to bugger off and bring back the coal dust."

Tommy grinned. "I don't want an image. When I find my special one, I don't want her to be what I expect. What do I know, anyway? I'm just a dumb stoker's son from Bristol, a mud-footed soldier. When I find someone I want her to be herself, as hard as she can. I want to spend a lifetime undressing her, and treasure each mystery."

The pub behind them roared with life. Through the window of the Mary Red Tommy could see the other Glasscastle - Jacinth it had to be, from the frenetic brilliance in his eyes - land his three darts in an irregular grouping on the dart-board and drink down a pint-glass of piss-yellow beer. Julian, cool-eyed, thoughtful, dragged again on his cigarette and released a cloud of smoke into the cool, dark air.

"I think," said Julian carefully, "I think this may have been an error of judgement."

"Eh?"

"Who do you love?"

"What are you asking me?"

But Julian only shook his head.

"Oi! Jay!" shouted his brother. "Your turn! Win the game for me, hey?"

Julian shrugged his bony shoulders and strolled inside. He kissed Kitty Price the barmaid for luck, landed three darts in the bulls-eye, and graciously accepted a round of beer from the losers.

He turned to grin at Tommy, who started shoving his way through the crowd, then dropped his beer in shock - Jacinth had just dropped like a felled tree.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _They came in low through the tunnel_ \- I couldn't find any close pictures of the tunnel leading between Hut 3 and 6 (they shared documents frequently, and shoved papers back and forth with broomsticks to keep from getting wet. Most of my Bletchley Park info came from www codesandciphers dot org dot uk. Very helpful, but not as complete as I'd like.
> 
> // _At the Mary Red_ \- So, I really don't know that much about the environs of Bletchley Park, and research materials sometimes don't have little useful details like pub names. Please don't trust any details in here, because the odds are good I made them up.
> 
> // _Julian Glasscastle_ - In the Japanese version, Yukito's family name 'Tsukishiro' translates to 'moon castle', which isn't too far from 'Glasscastle', I guess. Incidentally, 'Glasscastle' is another way of saying Glastonbury, an island in a lake in Great Britain associated with Arthurian myth, specifically, it might be Avalon. The English dub has Sakura's family name as 'Avalon', and Yukito's personal name as 'Julian'. None of this information is needed to read the story, but I thought the byzantine routes I go through to pick names might be entertaining to the reader. Cheers.
> 
> // _Jacinth Glasscastle_ - It's very difficult finding a man's name (in the Western side, anyway) that relates to flowers. For some reason, I wanted it to start with J. Jacinth (or Hyacinth) is either a precious stone, a flower, or a pretty young man that the sun god Apollo was friends with. He died. Yes, I do think too much about names.


	7. Enigma 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> some questions are better left unasked

Outside the Mary Red, Tommy eyed the Glasscastle brothers dubiously.

"He's tired," said Julian distinctly, "all out of virtue." He unwound Jacinth's arm from his shoulders and unloaded him on Tommy. "Do me a favour, old thing, and get him back to our rooms?"

Tommy scowled, but settled under the rangy Welshman's boneless weight. The older brother was already walking briskly away, only his white-pale hair and shirt keeping him from disappearing into the gloaming.

"Hey! Where are you off to, mate?" Tommy called. Behind them, the  _Mary Red_  roared

Julian waved without looking back. "Wine, women, and song? Who knows. TTFN!"

"You're a terrible brother!"

"Am I?" came drifting back.

Tommy had a few choice things to say. Fortunately Jacinth perked up enough to give directions after he was gone and they staggered down the road, a bit less the worse for alcohol than Tommy was used to but what the hell. A pair of Naval Wrens that worked in the Bombe room passed them by, their hair neatly curled and their patent-leather shoes clacking on the shiny-damp pavement. One looked up from adjusting her scarlet lipstick and smiled at him. He smiled back. She looked down at her watch pointedly and her smile got wider. Tommy rolled his eyes, shrugged, and mimed drinking with his free hand, then glared at the man draped loosely over his shoulder. The Wren smiled again, this time wryly with the corners just crinkling at the edges of her mouth. She nodded in the direction of the Mary Red, gestured vaguely, and lifted her eyebrows. Tommy let his face fall and patted the air about the level of his little sister's head. She nodded understandingly and let her friend pull her away, giggling.

"Huh, whuzza'?" mumbled Jacinth, lifting his head.

"Just having a chat," said Tommy, "in code."

"Codes are fun. The rule is," Jacinth slurred, "no character is itself."

"Eh?"

"Breaking Enigma. 'S the rule."

"Talk about Enigma out of the Park and I may have to break your head," said Tommy pleasantly, looking to see if anyone was in earshot.

"Tha's my soldier boy." The codebreaker's knees were sagging again, and his weight awkward without his (evil!) duplicate on the other side. Tommy swore under his breath, bent down, and hoisted Jacinth over his shoulder in a fireman's lift.

Across the road, one of the other codebreakers stopped to adjust the chain on his bicycle, looking at them with amusement. Tommy fumbled a salute with his free hand, then realised it probably wasn't appropriate for a civvy. Bugger.

"Have you seen Mr Fuzzywinkins?" asked the codebreaker.

"What?"

"Your landlady Mrs Pushkin," he said. "She can't find Fuzzywinkins. I promised I would ask you if I saw you."

"Oh, right." Tommy considered this evening's dinner of 'something like rabbit' with a sinking sensation in his stomach. "I'll... keep an eye out, then." But he wouldn't ask his sister. Some questions were better left unasked, some mysteries best unresolved.

"Hi Dr Turing!" called Jacinth from Tommy's shoulder. "I'm not drunk!"

"I understand completely," said the other codebreaker gravely.

 

**

 

The room the Glasscastle brothers shared was on the highest floor of their boarding house, where the ceiling slanted down sharply over an inset window laid with a white-painted seat. A high, narrow bed stood against one of the short sidewalls, with a low trundle-bed on wheels parked underneath, both neatly made up with matching quilts and faded, ruffled pillow-cases. Other furniture involved two over-stuffed armchairs, a poky pigeonholed desk, and bookshelves lining the three full-height walls. One lightbulb dangled from the ceiling. A framed photograph of a single pale boy with owlish glasses hung on the wall over a bundle of dried vervain.

By the time Tommy had gotten Jacinth up there and muscled into an arm-chair, the scars in his back were burning, not _exactly_ like red-hot pokers being driven into the abused muscles, but certainly bringing that metaphor to mind. He prowled around the room curiously, working the knots out of his shoulders, while the other watched  _him_ , curiously.

"I'm really not drunk," said the codebreaker.

"Just tired," Tommy agreed. "So sleep." The other didn't answer.

Tommy ran his hands over the red-leather cover of one of the books, fingered the golden, winged lion embossed on the cover next to the massive clasp. Its shard-of-amber eyes seemed to stare at him, judging sullenly. "What's this one about?"

"I'll tell you when I get the lock picked."

"A lockpicker," said Tommy, amused. "Huh. I didn't reckon breaking and entering your style.

"Jay and I used to, hmmm, wander astray, in our younger days."

"You were a bad boy!" said Tommy.

"Wicked beyond imagining," Jacinth agreed solemnly. Then, "It's lonely without him." He whistled idly, then quoted softly, "'When you're just a thing in his dream..."

Tommy turned the book over and traced the form of the stern silver angel on the back cover, its white wings curved about an emptiness, describing but never explaining.

"Stay. He will not be back tonight."

 

**

 

"The trouble with older brothers," said Tessa Archer as she buttered her scone, "is that they think they know all there is to know about food until it actually comes to _cooking_ it."

"Fortunately," said Jacinth Glasscastle, opening a jar of rosehip jam, "I am a  _younger_  brother. How are they?"

Tessa took a careful bite and considered her mouthful. "Delicious!" she said at last. They both beamed.

On the other side of the picnic mat the victims of the diatribe shared a packet of cigarettes and pretended to ignore the denunciation of their familial roles. They were watching a game of Rounders on the lawn outside the slightly shabby mansion. As they watched, a middle-aged woman with bobbed hair and a sensible cardigan over her tweeds threw an under-arm ball to a tall thin teenager with sticking out ears. He missed, dropped the bat, and ran wildly for a base.

"I'm telling you," said Tommy, "if Miss Feversham went professional she'd go far. She's got the eye, the Look of Eagles, the-"

"Truly a great loss to the world of competitive Rounders," drawled Julian. "But I think young Eric has potential. A bob he scores at least two runs in the next innings."

"You're on."

They were interrrupted when two plates of food were passed over their shoulders. "Is that going to be enough?" said Tommy, looking askance at the enormous platter that Julian took from his brother.

"Oh yes, I had a bite before I came," said Julian, very seriously.

"Where are you getting the ration stamps?" asked Tessa.

"Jay's tapeworm has its own book," said Jacinth lightly but she didn't giggle. Instead the pair leant in and had a quiet, very serious discussion about procuring food supplies in the area. Tommy tried not to listen to the more dubious details. (Poor Mr Fuzzywinkins.)

It wasn't that he didn't trust his sister. But... there'd been a good six months from the time he woke up in a field hospital with shrapnel in his back and a desperate dream that his family needed him, and actually wangling a post Home. When he finally pulled his little sister out of the orphanage they'd stuffed her in when the rest of the family kicked the bucket in the Blitz, his beloved little sister who liked hair ribbons and dolls with lacy dresses had gone a bit... feral.

For all the girl twinkled and made herself cute, she never trusted where her next meal was coming from, for one thing, not until it was two thirds down her gullet, and she took a diabolical pride in keeping Tommy's own belly full. He knew damn well there was at least one knife secreted about her person, and that as far as his pretty little sister was concerned it only counted as 'wrong' if you got caught. The only two people he knew other than himself that she didn't sidle around so they were always in view were the daft Welshmen sharing his blanket, for which he would put up with a great deal more nonsense from the both of them, thank you very much. He didn't, anymore, doubt that his sister would survive the war, physically at least. He was working on the sane part.

"You're broooooodiiiiiing," said Julian next to him, and tweaked his nose. Tommy stole the last cigarette from the packet.

"It's all decided," said Tessa, cracking the lid on a thermos so the steam rose up in the air. "Jay is going to marry me when I grow up. You can be the disreputable uncle."

"Ta."

"Thank you for the chocolate, O Future Wife," said Jacinth, accepting a cup. Then, "Do you remember, Jay, in Dresden, we could get marvellous hot chocolate in this little  _Schokoladengeschäft_  on the main street with the tiled walls with flowers painted on them. And all the little  _hausfraus_  would come in in the afternoon and try to set us up with their daughters. It was... right next to that new munitions plant they just built. They'll have bombed it to nothing by now..." The liquid in his cup spilled over as his hands started to shake, scalding them.

His brother turned suddenly, and took the cup away. "Here," he said, tapping Jacinth on the forehead and staring at him intently, "We're here, and with a job to do, and some things can't be helped so there's no use thinking on them.  _Forget._ "

Jacinth's hands shook, his eyes averted. Julian caught his chin and forced Jacinth's eyes to meet his own, an odd trick of the sunlight making them flash silver. "I said _Forget."_ His hand dropped. 

"If you like," said Jacinth cheerfully and ate another scone. He beamed and looked up at the sky. "What a beautiful day!"

Tommy busied himself holding a cup for his sister's pouring, pretending not to see. He felt Julian's silence, even so.

"So which uncle am I?"

"The Remittance Man in the Colonies that we never talk about."

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _TTFN "Ta ta for now!"_ \- Tagline from a popular radio show of the time, ITMA
> 
> // _Its shard-of-amber eyes seemed to stare..._ \- By the way, 'to stare' in Japanese is jirojiromiru. It's such a cool word that I needed to share. Sorry for the floridity of the language (but not very).
> 
> // I bagged the rules for Rounders from the Great Wiki, which is never wrong except when it is. If I got a detail incorrect, please forgive me. The Code Book (Singh, 1999) tells me that Rounders was a daily after-lunch sport with the codebreakers.
> 
>  _"A bob he scores at least two runs"_ \- A bob is one shilling.


	8. Enigma 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> all is lost, all is lost

"And then a flower-pot fell on my head," said Tommy.

Julian laughed like a donkey, great braying raucous laughs that echoed around the street of black-curtained houses, drowning out the crickets that chirped in the summer night.

"Yeah, funny. I was out of it for a week and seeing double for three days after I woke up, and all the old ladies in woolly coats were,  _'Bon jour, M'sieur Pot-de-fleur,_  you will carry my groceries for me,  _n'est ce pas?'_  The guys in my company reckoned it was hilarious, the bastards."

Julian set his own basket down and leaned against the rough stone wall of a church, doubled over, clutching his sides. "You were  _such_  a good boy," he choked out.

Tommy flicked his eyes sideways at his tow-haired friend. "Well, the  _young_  ladies said  _'Bon_ _soir_ _.'_  Swings and roundabouts." He switched the large cake tin he was carrying to a different arm. "Do we have everything?"

 

**

 

" E," said Jacinth, putting down the letter tiles. "And look," he said beaming, "a Triple Word Score."

"That is  _not_  a real word," said Tessa, wrinkling her nose.

"It is a real word," said Jacinth, "You may look it up if you wish." In the low yellow light of the lamp they were using to save electricity, he'd put on his silver-rimmed reading glasses. He pushed them further up his nose so the light glinted off the glass panes and patted an enormous, dusty dictionary of onion-skin pages printed in 7-point type. "In here."

The little girl snarled amiably and put down U N in front of I, used an M to link it to P E A C H and put down A B L E on the end. She smiled, revealing a missing tooth.

"That is... actually a word." He riposted with N E S S on the end. Then Tessa put I C I T Y on the end of her last word, to make a trail off the edge of the board and grinned like a shark. "Ahhh..." said Jacinth.

"Do you want to discuss it with my Big Brother?" she asked.

"Hey, unfair," he said. "He's so adorable I keep forgetting what to say."

"Well, sic your brother on him. He's good at being spiky."

Tessa glanced at the clock.

"They'll be back soon," said Jacinth. "They always are."

Her level eyebrows wrinkled together but she didn't say anything.

Jacinth patted her hand. "And I'm here anyway, yes? Do you want to open a present early?"

 

**

 

Julian looked up at the clear sky, bright with a round clear moon and sprinkled stars. "Bomber's Moon," he said.

"I didn't reckon they come in this far," said Tommy.

"Not often." Julian picked up his basket. "Shall we go?" They turned the corner around the little church in silence, stepping past the sand-buckets on either side of the ornamental doorway. Scrawled in chalk over the heavy iron lock was a cartoon of a long-nosed man peering over a wall, and the words  _Wot, no Salvation?_  Funny. Then Julian asked, "Say, you like Jay, right?"

Tommy sighed and sat down on the church steps. He set the cake tin beside the galvanised bucket of gritty, pale sand, lit a cigarette, sighed and started telling stories.

He told Julian about the three barmaids of St Jean le Peu, the one who was pregnant, the one who liked green apples, and the one who was going to die. He talked about the mates from his street gone in one falling squib, and how most of the neighbourhood was gone too, so who was going to know they'd ever been if Tommy didn't remember them, eh? He talked about tracking down a nasty little orphange in south Bristol, and what he'd really felt when he saw his little sister again. He talked about the five minutes on a field of rubble he realised how very beautiful a single battered daisy was. At the end of his second cigarette he talked about how his best mate had smiled sweetly one day, and patted him on the cheek, and then shot him in the back and left him under a pile of rubble.

"Why are you telling me this?" asked Julian.

Tommy shrugged. "I get the feeling this is my last chance, somehow." He stubbed out his cigarette on the stone step and went on. "To this day, y'know, I can't tell if my mate shooting me cracked my world open or if I'd been waiting for it." He stubbed out his cigarette on the steps, and promised himself a donation to the poorbox. "But I could never stop  _looking_  at people after. Trying to read what they were up to. Get me?"

Julian nodded silently.

"I got a rep for it, in my company, even with those crusty sons of b- Well you know. Started getting sent on the 'special' jobs."

"So? You haven't answered my question."

Tommy snorted air through his nose. "J. Glasscastle has travelled extensively through Europe, and in particular Germany."

"A useful background for a codebreaker." Julian sat very still on the steps.

"J. Glasscastle has links with several German esoteric societies."

"He was sponsored into the Golden Dawn by that mad irishman Bill Yeats, also." Julian looked straight out into the night, his wide mouth curling at the edges. A trick of the moonlight on his side-on eyes made them glow pale and nacreous. "We daily perform acts of black sorcery and commune with spirits in our chores here at sweet old Bletchley so what's a little magick between friends, eh?"

"I wouldn't know," said Tommy. "Except that all of those links have lapsed well and truly. It took a lot of digging to make sure, but the line is dead, the birdie in the cage is not chirping, J. Glasscastle is a British hound for the duration of the conflict. You get my point."

Julian stretched easily, shutting his eyes and leaning into it. "No, I can't say I do," he said sighing. "So?"

"So J. Glasscastle is only one person and who the hell are you?"

 

**

 

"They're late," said Tessa. Jacinth dealt a black seven on a black eight with a new set of playing cards. "Huff!" she said, and took the rest of his turn, piling five cards from the spread of Huff Patience into Jacinth's decks. "We could go look for them."

"We could," said Jacinth. "But it's late and, well, something may have come up." He glanced at the little ticking clock. "They may be having a... long talk or something."

"This is  _not_  a good time," she said, scowling.

"Your mask is slipping." The girl put both hands to her mouth.

Jacinth went on, very gently, "I think that perhaps it is that you're scared that your brother won't come back at all, aren't you, Tessa?" She didn't say anything.

"There's only one thing for it," he said, slapping his thighs. "Time to blacken their names and open presents without them!"

"You're not going to yell at them for... whatever it is they're up to, are you," said Tessa glumly. "It isn't  _fair._ "

"Jay's been all I ever wanted in a brother, no complaints there," Jacinth said quietly. "I don't like to think what my life would have been without him. If he wants to... take his time fetching the groceries I." He stopped. "I was about to say, 'wouldn't like to be a bother' but that would be a lie. It hurts being left, it truly does, whatever their reasons. Tell you what," he said, shuffling one of his card decks with long, nervous fingers, "I'll shout at  _your_  brother, and you shout at mine, and all will be well."

"You're not supposed to shuffle!  _Huff! Huff! Huff!_ "

"Oops."

 

**

 

Tommy saw the shoulders of the man beside him shaking, trembling. Then Julian turned his face to him twisted in a diabolical grin, and Tommy realised the man was choking back laughter. He was up on his feet before he knew it, hands twisted in the collar of the other man's shirt and slamming him back against the church door.

"But really it is hilarious," protested Julian. "All these years moving among magicians and spiritualist, fakirs and fortune-tellers, and the only one to spot little Jay's imaginary friend is  _you,_  a monkey reaching for the moon in water - what, enough Sight to call a coin-toss two times out of three? Oh, my sides hurt."

Tommy twisted harder. "What are you?"

Julian smiled beautifically and melted away, like a reflection in a pond that had been scattered by wind. He called down from the roof: "An airy spirit, my friend. A thing of darkness acknowledged by... no-one."

The grin fell from his face suddenly, and he walked down the narrow ridgepole of the church, gravel and dirt from the ridges in his boots skittering down the shingles. "My current existence is... tenuous. I needed a mind to reflect in and Jay was convenient. Compliant."

"Kind."

Julian's mouth twisted. "I was about to say lonely but that too. He's been so very easy to use, the dear, but alas, all good things must end. It's not that I dislike him, truly, but the well it runs dry.

"I'll take my wardenship elsewhere. Perhaps a man who doesn't shatter his heart in pieces all the time like little Jay will find more favour with the Selector someday."

"With who?"

"It's not something you have the strength to deal with, Tommy- _bach_ ," said Julian gently, his face changing again as the shadows of moonlight made it haggard.

"Let this one go. Go back to your little sister and your little war, tend to your duties until they break you, and I, I shall stay awake in the night and dance on all your ashes!" And filled with sudden glee he danced on the roof, cracking shingles with his heavy clacking boots.

He paused and looked at Tommy with suspicion. "Why are you laughing?"

"You," said Tommy, half-choking. "Your presence hurts your brother but you're worried what will happen when you leave, and you miss him desperately already. And here you are like a kid with a grazed knee, telling the world you're big and bad and don't care about anything. It's  _adorable_."

Julian skidded down the steep roof and crouched like a gargoyle on the guttering. "Like I said, a monkey reaching for the moon in water. I don't care for mortals overmuch. And my _true_ brother hasn't spoken to me in years."

"So start the conversation. People screw up. It happens."

"Oh, like leaving Tessa alone for half a year? That kind of screw up?"

"I had duties on the front... It took time getting back without deserting."

"Ah, I see," said Julian politely. "Which is why we are talking so long and making her wait for her party."

Tommy's fists clenched. Julian offered a hand. "Would you like to come up?"

"What will you tell him."

"Nothing. He'll forget I was ever here and be happy."

"No!"

Julian's face appeared over the edge of the roof, amused. "You'd have him remember being abandoned?"

"Whatever was between you, it was real! At least a little. You are not a cruel man."

"I'm not  _one_  of those things. And here I was going to take out six months of Tessa's memory too, as a parting gift to the pair of you," Julian said lightly. "You'd get along easier without it. She might trust you, then."

"Keep your hands off Tessa," Tommy said tightly, "or so help me I will find a way to break your scrawny neck."

Julian didn't move, but his eyes glittered. Behind him the shape of night formed around him, somehow suggesting the shape of dark brooding wings, like a predatory bird about to strike, and thunder sounded distant in the sky.

Tommy refused to flinch. "Let him remember you were there, a brother, and that you liked him."

Julian leaned over the edge, closer. "And what will you trade me for it?"

"I'll remember that you were here, a friend. And that I liked you."

Julian's eyes opened painfully wide. "Go home," he said, and disappeared.

 

**

 

Tessa cradled the brightly painted music box in her hands. "I made the mechanism inside," said Jacinth proudly. "Jay painted the box, it used to hold cigars and the smell hasn't gone away yet. Sorry."

She wound the silver clockwork key carefully and set the tune going. "It's  _Ach du Lieber..._  She looked up and saw Jacinth lying forward on the table, unconsious, so pale she could almost see through him. Through the thin walls of the boarding house, she heard the air siren begin to wail.

 

**

 

They came in low through the still night air, fat-bellied bombers from the Luftwaffe pregnant with fire. The air-raid sirens whined through the night. Tommy almost thought he could his little sister's cries, high and shrill and clear, cut off suddenly. Tommy ran.

The boarding house where they lived had half the roof gone. Tommy ran through the back doors, up the stairs. Along the hall, lined with yellow striped wallpaper and Mrs Pushkin's second best sidetable. Through the cardboard-frail door.

The room was a wreck. Dull crepe paper streamers stirred fitfully in the breeze coming through the gaping hole in the wall, half covered with the shattered rubble and stains of something that looked dark in the moonlight. On the floor a little music box still played:  _Ach, du lieber Augustin, all is lost, all is lost..._  There were no people.

"Tessa!" Tommy shouted. "Jay!" Nobody answered.  _All is lost, all is lost._  He went through the rooms, as methodically as if he were checking for snipers, as the air raid siren wailed and the drone of the bombers went over head. No-one was caught in the rubble.

Finally, he went outside, and opened the door to the bomb shelter. Jacinth was inside, his shirt all bloody, curled over a small form in a cotton-print dress. Tommy's breath caught, then he saw Jacinth look up and Tessa clutch the other man tighter, head buried in his shoulder. For a moment Tommy felt pure, irrational jealousy that someone else was looking after  _his_  little sister. Then Jacinth shook pale hair out of his eyes and all Tommy felt was warm relief.

Jacinth looked at Tommy over the girl's bowed head. "He's gone, then," said the codebreaker.

Tommy nodded.

"But you're here."

Tommy nodded again, throat dry.

"It's decided," said Tessa from a creaky-dry throat, "we yell at you in the morning."

And somehow, right now, everything was alright. He could live with that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // Bon jour - Good day.
> 
> // n'est-ce pas - I think it means something like, "not so?"
> 
> // Bon soir - Good evening
> 
> // Swings and roundabouts - "What you lose on the swings, you gain on the roundabouts."
> 
> // Blighty Town is where a lot of recuperating soldiers were sent.
> 
> // Huff Patience is a two-player form of the game. There's a game objective, to get all the cards stacked from Ace to King like normal Patience/Solitaire, and a player objective, to get rid of all your cards. If you ever miss the game objective, the opposing player can Huff you and take your turn. Jacinth is just exceptionally bad at it, messing up simple game mechanics.
> 
> // Every time I worry that I'm writing Yue as too nasty, I remember the scene where he complains about having to be "that loser" Yukito, and my qualms about characterisation cease.
> 
> // ...a monkey reaching for the moon in water... It's a Zen proverb, that is to say, an idiot reaching for the unreal. Not actually as insulting as Julian is making it out to be – illogic is a strong element of Zen, and illusions have their own reality, ne? At the least, the perception of them has a real effect on the observer.
> 
> // airy spirit... thing of darkness From Shakespeare's The Tempest - Ariel and Caliban respectively.
> 
> // Tommy-bach - '-bach' is Welsh, added to a name it's something like 'dear'.


	9. Interlude With Sun And Moon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (this never happened. no-one remembers it so it never happened.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem comes from a very old book of Japanese poetry, the _Manyoshu,_ and is formally titled: "A poem composed by Kakinomoto no Asomi Hitomaro when Prince Karu lodged on the fields of Aki." (Prince Karu was travelling to his dead father's old hunting lodge, to remember the man.) This translation comes from _A Waka Anthology Volume One: The Gem-Glistening Cup._ (Cranston, Edwin A., Stanford University Press, 1993). Apparently, travelling to Aki to celebrate the scene is a yearly event.
> 
> If I've screwed up my depiction of Aki, please forgive me. I can't find a detailed description of terrain, and for all I know there's a city there now.

_He... now departs_  
_The firm-established_  
_City of the sacred rule,_  
_And up mountain slopes_  
_By hill-secluded Hatsuse,_  
_On rough mountain tracks_  
_Where the bristling timber stands..._

 _And when evening comes_  
_That gleams as softly as a glinting gem,_  
_On the snowy plain,_  
_The vast fields of Aki,_  
_He spreads the ground_  
_With bannergrass and small bamboo,_  
_And grass for pillow..._

 

Osaka Joe, Psychic Detective, said, "It could be fun."

Honourable Secretary Jade Platter said, "I do not think the budget will extend."

Keroberous, Golden-Eyed Beast of the Seal said, "Mountain-climbing? For poetry? That's  _hardcore._ "

Then Jade Platter said, "But, the budget. Our food money.  _What will we eat?_ "

And Keroberous said, "Eh, it'll all work out, missy. We'll find a job on the way."

And then Osaka Joe said, "You're... not still afraid of _heights,_ are you, Odango-han?"

Which is why the next day found Osaka and Jade Platter toiling over a chilly hillside in rented hiking gear, following a group of hikers like chattering, brightly-coloured birds across the bleak landscape. Osaka paused and adjusted the laces on his boots one more time. There were blisters.

"Where's your warrior spirit?" demanded Keroberous from inside Osaka's pack. (He had recently discovered war movies and had been cheering them on with cries of "Hut hut hut!" and "For our Beloved Emperor!") Osaka decided not to explain at which point of their hike his warrior spirit had run away yelping and hidden in the scrubby brush.

Jade Platter stood a little ahead, on the crest of the hill, and shouted, "Please look! Please look!" They'd found the plains of Aki, falling away from the high places, desolate and cold and ancient.

 

**

 

 _The travellers who take_  
_Shelter on the fields of Aki -_  
_Do they lie at ease,_  
_Are they able to find sleep,_  
_When they think of days gone by?_

That night, Osaka lay on a pile of cut bracken, shivering inside a padded sleeping bag. A few metres away there was a bonfire surrounded by noisy, cheerful people.

"I am cold," he heard Jade Platter say.

"I, also, am very cold," he replied. "Perhaps we could..."

"Yes."

Jade Platter sat up and he heard rustling cloth and zips unzipping. Then the weight of her sleeping bag settled over his head. "Here," she said, and trotted over to the campfire.

Osaka's sides shook silently. The sleeping bag was still warm. He sighed, pulled it around him, and snuggled. Later, still sleepless, he made his own way to the campfire, where the terribly enthusiastic young people were passing around bottles and mugs and half-incinerated marshmallows.

"Yes," he heard Jade Platter say. "You  _are_  dreaming. You are dreaming that a small stuffed toy is walking and talking."

"An' putting away more beer than you!" added Keroberous.

 

**

 

 _Eastward on the fields_  
_A flickering of flame begins_  
_To rise against the dark,_  
_And looking back the sunken moon_  
_Is seen to rest upon the land._

 

"Look," said Osaka, pointing. The round yellow moon was dipping down to the western horizon. "And there," he said, nodding his head the other way, where the sun was just coming up. "It doesn't happen often that they match up, but, eh... it happens." A little way away, the other hikers were cheering loudly.

Keroberous on his shoulder was quivering, small black bead eyes as wide as they would go. "But," he said quietly, "but I've been here before. It was, Clow was here, and Yue, and, and..." All at once the small beast shot into the sky and vanished in a dizzy, gambolling spiral.

 

_We come in memory of him,  
Our lord who passed like the yellow leaf..._

 

 _"Clow was here!"_  echoed down from above.

Who knew what the other hikers thought of this. The 'just a dream' excuse had to be wearing a bit thin by now. Osaka filled his ivory pipe with cold-stiff hands and lit it, hunching over to shield the flame from the wind. He felt very tired all of a sudden – tired and cold, and not as young as he remembered he used to be.

"How did you know?" his secretary asked quietly.

He shrugged. "Lucky guess?"

He knew Jade Platter's moods by now, a little, and didn't need to see her face: this was the silence that meant a doubtful eyebrow cocked in his direction.

"I played the odds," he said, drawing on his pipe and releasing a mouthful of tobacco smoke. "It seemed the sort of thing a person of Clow-sensei's character might do."

Jade Platter sat on the hillock next to him. "It is the sort of thing a person of  _your_  character would do."

Osaka looked up, and she tweaked his nose.

"Nnngh – c-cold. C-c-cold fingers. Agh! No tickling, have mercy! C-c-cold."

 

**

 

 _Peer of the Sun,_  
_His Highness our most noble Prince_  
_Would line up his steeds_  
_And start upon the royal hunt_  
_At this very hour that now has come._

"It's... snowing quite a lot. I'm a city boy. Is that normal from a clear sky?"

From above, they heard, " _Clow Card! INCOMING..."_


	10. Under the Covers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Book porn. I regret nothiiiiiing...

You're bored.

Around you the books are too dusty and dry and clothbound and numbered to even loom over you. Looming is not for this library. You tap your toe to the buzzing of the fluorescent light and a passing librarian  _glares_. You shrug it off and slouch down the aisle, finger an unexpectedly classy red-leather lion combo. The librarian is looking at you.

You look back, caught suddenly by a line of jaw, the curve of a character-line behind silver-edged spectacles. You wonder suddenly what it would be like to peel away layers of leather and cloth by candlelight, to breathe must, fingers pacing a slow word-track along the white skin of the page, to explore territories eternal and ever new with the reading.

The librarian's eyes flash like sudden moons; you swallow hard.

And go home with some nice Edwardian erotica, instead.


	11. The Cerberus Dialogues 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A question of identity.

"You! It's you, eh?"

"Eh?" I replied, eloquently. I looked around my schoolroom, again bare after a flock of students back from the hols had inhabited it for a few, nervous-prostration-inducing hours. It was reddish and dim in the late afternoon sun slanting through the windows. The smell of dust and linoleum blended with the tang of slightly-illicit gin brewed by Mr Todd the school gardener and the delicious must of the old books I'd rescued from our library.

There was no-one in the room.

A small, dandelion yellow paw reached out of the book on top of the pile, waved in the air, and sank its claws into the red leather cover, hauling out a small yellow round-eared head, a veritable lion-cub in animate plush who rested its forelegs and chin on the ornate metal edge of the book as if it were the edge of a swimming pool and narrowed its beady black eyes in my general direction.

"You, eh? You're you, eh?"

"Well... yes," I said. "I am me, and you are you, eh?" I proffered a hand. "How very nice to meet you."

"Eh?" The 'lion-cub' looked confused. "No,  _you're_  you, er, and I'm  _me_."

"No,  _I_  am me," I replied stoutly. "And you are  _you_ , er," I paused, struck by a thought, "You aren't mad, are you?"

"Many have asked," the toy said complacently. "Mad like a fox!" he added. "I swear, Clow got all his best ideas from me."

I let that pass. "Am  _I_  mad?" I queried (not being in the habit of chatting with stuffed toys, at least not with my conversational sallies returned so amiably).

"Of course not," the toy assured me. "If you were mad, I'd let you know right away."

"That is fine then," I said, reassured. "I am Miss Evelyn Moongrass," I informed him.

"'Evening Moon' - nice," the toy said.

I felt unaccountably pleased. "And you are?"

The toy's ears drooped, and I felt an odd pain in my gut.

"Cerberus," it said, in a very small voice. "Are you  _sure_  you're not you, eh?"

"Quite certain," I said firmly, though in truth the particulars were starting to escape me, (perhaps a little too much of the moonshine gin - Mr Todd's brewing being of a very vigorous vintage.)

"Are you perhaps on holiday from guarding the Gates of Hell, Mr Cerberus?" I asked.

He held up a paw. "That's just a namesake. For one thing, I'm not a dog."

"Oh, I see."

"And three heads? Not to put too fine a point on it, but I'm not that tacky. I like your silver spectacles, by the way. The rest is a bit, um, tweedy."

I sniffed.

"No, no, it's lovely," Mr Cerberus added hurriedly. "'When you are Real," he quoted, "'shabbiness doesn't matter.'"

"But I am not Real," I said.

His tiny bead eyes blinked at me.

"At least not to my students," I clarified. "Most of them sincerely believe I vanish as soon as they leave my classroom."

"Their loss!" Mr Cerberus said gallantly.

"Thank you! You are quite the sweetest plush toy that I have ever encountered!"

_"I am not a toy!!"_  he roared.

We both froze, then, as the heavy footsteps of the school custodian passed our room, flashing a torch in the gathering shadows of the evening. I did not entirely fancy having to share my secret stock of moonshine, and Mr Cerberus would have his own objections to conversing with that crass and boorish person, or so I imagined.

The heavy footsteps passed. Mr Cerberus went on,  _sotto voce_  but with some heat, "It's not how you were made. It's a thing that happens to you. That's what _he_ said. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you're not a toy at all, you're REAL.  _He_  promised me and there's an end to it."

I sniffed.  _"Fairy_  stories..."

The door crashed open then, and two of my students, the Reeve twins, skittered into my quiet room with an enormous wicker basket. "Hello Miss Moongrass we brought apples and oranges for youuuuuu," they chorused.

"It's a little known fact," said one, holding up an instructive finger, "that apple pips are the nicest part. Indeed, in old and far off times apples were bred for the pips and the flesh was so solid that when they dropped on the head you could die. That was why Newton invented gravity, so that-"

"Yes, yes, yes," said her sister, pulling her away by the collar. "We had extra in our tuckbox, Miss, and we thought you'd like some... Bye!"

"This proves nothing," I said. "They simply hope that I will 'forget' tonight's homework by the morning. It is entirely class-related."

I stopped then, because Mr Cerberus was not just chomping apples but had  _stolen my gin!_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> By this point, Yue's been burying his consciousness deeper beneath his facades. It takes a lot less energy to maintain (so no need to find an energy-donor and suck on them like a bloated spiritual tick until they risk an early death from power-exhaustion, just for instance, say), but the facades get a lot more autonomy. Like Yukito later, Miss Moongrass has no idea she's a front.
> 
> _illicit gin..._ otherwise known as 'moonshine' ^_^
> 
> _"Mad like a fox"_ \- "Crazy like a fox" used at least as early as 1944 (there's a book of that title by S. J. Perelman
> 
> _Miss Evelyn Moongrass_ \- 'Evelyn' for the 'evening' sound; 'Moongrass' nicked from Lud-in-the-Mist, a demmed fine novel by Hope Mirrlees (it was actually a brand of cheese). 'Miss' because crankyfemme!Yue appeals to me enormously, and because Keroberous thought it likely that Mizuki Kaho was Yue in the first half of the story - therefore, Yue could reasonably have a female disguise.
> 
> _"When you are Real shabbiness doesn't matter."_ \- This, and other commentary on Being Real come from _The Velveteen Rabbit,_ which I have complicated feelings about but there it is.


	12. The Cerberus Dialogues 2

Summer, and the crack of a red leather cricket ball given what-for by a length of stout willow echoed through our classroom, bringing with it the scent of dry cut grass and rank weed from the low river nearby. Inside it was quiet, with dustmotes drifting lazily through the shafts of warm sunlight as the students worked stolidly through their set essays, their heads drooping one by one to their ugly, battered desks as they succumbed to the sleepy heat.

I was waiting for the last to fall and then (oh  _then_ ) there would be a row and a conniption raised unto Heaven. I had my eye already set on the perfect book – large, red, and heavy, perfectly suited for dropping onto my desk with a sharp and ominous thud that would resonate through the echo chamber of the desk and the carefully arranged concert hall of my classroom to create lingering harmonics of  _DOOM_. I had yet to drive one of my students into a heart attack, but, it added spice to the arduous round of my daily existence to try.

Alas, the Reeve twins were still at it, scribbling through their note books with a hectic and unholy vigour. I already knew what the books would contain: one a pack of outrageous lies about their assigned Topic (was it Jersey cows this time?), the other a set of painstaking corrections of her sister's fabrications. I had yet to catch them consulting each other on this dual act, and had taken to choosing Topics at random to foil the pair, to no success. They never passed notes. Perhaps those long braided pigtails worked as antennae, or they really did only have a half-soul each, the which, resonating between them, conveyed the information necessary to confound me. No matter: I would get them yet.

The dusty summer heat swept over me like the hot breath of hell. I sneaked a sip of colourless liquid from my 'water' glass and relished the icy burn sliding down my throat. I fingered the red book lovingly and waited for my moment – not even the Reeves could last forever -

"My, someone's looking catty today..."

The cover of my red book lifted a trifle, and a pair of beady black eyes looked at me with what I refused to call amusement.

I dipped a pen in the well of blood-red ink I kept for corrections and penned a brief reply:  _I do not care overmuch for the summer heat._

"Your loss," Mr Cerberus murmured back, grinning. Out of the book stretched one lazy, tawny leg which flexed its claws one by one. "So who've you got today? That tall girl who's good at softball? The Trouble Trio, Little Miss Ginger? Them?"

He saw me frown, and said, in mock befuddlement, "Really, what is it about Them, Miss Moongrass?"

_I am, of course, fair and impartial to all my stu-_

The little beast read the note upside down and, catching that last, threw back his head and cackled, accidentally flipping the cover of his book up high. I slammed it down hurriedly, ignoring his squeak, then realised with horror that one of the Reeve twins was looking at me She sat with her back straight as a ladder, mouth pursed in a tiny O, watching. Her pen was very still, undoubtedly pooling a blot onto her page. I regained my composure and attained an appropriately dignified and severe countenance. Luckily, she was the twin that made up fanciful tales all the time. Daisy, was it? My little secret was safe. Unless it was Margaret. Oh dear.

A slip of paper fell out of the book, carefully scratched with words:  _But seriously, Miss Moongrass, why Them?_

Pish and tosh. It was not that I disliked them  _per se_ , but the pair was indubitably creepy, with their antennae pigtails, and their chirpy little voices just enough off pitch that the ensuing discordance made their voices noticeable in any crowd, and their chirpiness, and their sneaking apples onto my desk, and their swiftly declining production of errors that could be excoriated with a flourish of my bloody pen forcing me to consult  _advanced grammar texts just to keep ahead_ , and their damnable chirpiness. I did not even like apples.

Not that I was willing to impart this information to a small fantastical  _voyeur_. I replied simply,  _Matched sets are annoying_ , and, over the quiet snickering from the book, smiled graciously to the Reeve girl until her nerve broke and she got back to work.

 _Enough of this,_  said the next slip of paper spat from the book,  _I must see this miracle pair for myself._  I meditated with thankfulness on the fact that Mr Cerberus was confined to the Book for the duration of his guardianship, however long that might be, whatever esoteric underworld he might be guarding. However, I experienced a brief moment of vertigo, and realised that the book appeared to be gliding to the edge of my desk because it really was, carried on four stealthy cat feet. I hurriedly hauled it back, and covered the grumble of "Let me go I want to  _see,_ " with a fit of coughing and then set my elbows onto the book and leaned all of my weight onto it. I found myself sliding around like a drunk person. The Reeve girl was looking at me again – or was it the other Reeve girl? She stared, and then her eyes turned into happy crescents.

I thought with horror of the merry tales of poltergeist-ridden books and drunken teachers about to be spun through the common rooms and behind the bike sheds. The book beneath me heaved and the pages rattled outrageously – what signs and wonders would be unleashed when it finally, completely opened, what apocalypse was I sitting on, eh? I found myself wishing, urgently, not to find out.

I shouted, "It's only a pack of cards!"

And then I woke up, still sitting bolt upright in my chair. There was a stack of copybooks stacked neatly on my desk, and all my craven students had vanished. Outside the window came the sharp crack of a cricket bat hitting the ball. I sighed, and took another sip from my glass, only to find it empty. The big red book lurked innocuously on the desk; there were two shiny red apples on it, set either side of the golden lion blazon grinning at me.

 _The little wretches,_  I thought with disfavour.  _You may not have the manners to even pretend to be afraid of me, but I'll get you yet. Oh yes I will._

They were not bad, for apples.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // _Little Miss Ginger_ \- It occurred to me after writing this that, in some parts of Great Britain, redheads are picked on for their hair-colour and that Miss Moongrass's offhand nickname could be perceived as genuinely hurtful by some readers. My apologies: I couldn't think of anything to replace it with, and the woman is supposed to be kind Of a dick. (I have no regrets picking on twins: being one myself I'm entitled.)
> 
> // _"It's only a pack of cards!"_ \- Stolen from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.


	13. The Cerberus Dialogues 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Every story has an ending.

"It is not that I  _mind_ ," I said. "It is the way of things. Releasing students like hawks into the dewy-mist-morning is a fierce delight, a rapture unparalleled, a  _something."_  I leaned back in my teachery chair, stretched, and set my patent-leather boots onto my desk. The classroom, empty of desks and edged with denuded bookshelves echoed plaintively.

"But I must confess a certain... feeling of  _loss._ " I plucked another roasted hazelnut from the bowl and cracked it between my teeth. "No young minds left to warp. No riotous showdowns every weekday and netball coaching on Saturday. No," here my eyebrow twitched, "no  _homework_."

On the great red book on my desk was small, yellow Mr Cerberus, half couchant, half supine. "What will you do with the school closing? Find another position?"

I waved an airy hand, "I have sought out a little retirement bungalow on the coast. There is a garden. I believe I shall study croquet."

"You never wanted to, I don't know, keep one of the sproglets for yourself? Bring them along all special-like?" I could almost swear the little beast looked wistful and sad as he scanned the empty classroom. His tone grew honeyed: "If you picked the kids right, they'd be good for Christmases and birthdays until you died!"

It was tempting, but: "No, no," I said firmly, "I am far too old to change my ways. A teacher is all my existence, retired or otherwise. I shall go into the west, and diminish, and remain Evelyn Moongrass."

Mr Cerberus sat back on his haunches, shocked. "You've been reading...  _fantasy."_

" _Take that back!_  It was just a, er, turn of phrase," I replied sharply.

"Who are you talking to, Miss?"

It was one of the Reeve girls, walking slowly into the room with her old-fashioned skirt swirling around her knees. When did the girl get so  _tall?_  Or was it just that she stood very straight, holding her head like the braids wrapped around it were a crown?

"I have been driven into senility by the trauma induced by decades of students," I said placidly.

She dimpled in a smile, and walked to the desk, swinging her satchel. "We're going to Oxford," she said, "reading English. A full scholarship," she added cheerfully, "one for each of us, Miss. I think I'm going to be a writer.

"Daisy wants to be a book editor, or possibly an arctic explorer." Dimples formed again. "Not that you would be interested at all, Miss."

I wasn't.

However, crouched in an untidy heap on the opposite side of the book from the girl Mr Cerberus looked at me with begging eyes. It occurred to me that he must have been lonely, all these years talking only with my own sweet self. How bad could the disaster if the book be opened really be? I snorted, and shrugged, and moved a little, so that the girl (young woman) might approach it if she desired.

She did: stepping forward silently and caressing the cover. "We always wondered what was written in here. The Upper Sixth was divided between the secrets of the universe and French novels, the risqué kind." Her solemn eyes met mine, refusing to be apologetic about this impudence. She fingered the clasp.

The door flew open and her sister clopped inside trailing eccentric ribbons. "Oh, hey Miss, glad we caught you before you vanished." She pounced on the book with glee, and I watched with a certain alarm as Mr Cerberus dangled precariously from the edge, still out of view, but only barely.

Daisy's eyes crescented upwards, "It is a little known fact," she said joyfully, "that this isn't a book, but a holder for some playing cards. You see, once upon a time there was a magician, like Prospero from the play only handsomer, and he had fifty-two spells that-"

Her sister clutched her by the collar and rolled her eyes. "Yes, yes, yes, but you're bothering Miss Moongrass. She hauled Daisy away, smiling gently. "Thanks for everything, Miss!"

And they were gone.

Not that I would miss them, or anything.


	14. Interlude: The Ship Captain's Tale

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The older brother ends a journey  
> A pretty blind rose regards both sides of the mountain

_Somewhere in the beginning_

 

The Chinaman was dying.

I cradled the big man in my arms, where he coughed up red all over my shirt. He pawed feebly at the tiny knife stuck in his chest, his dark eyes bewildered. It takes some of them that way, truly, death the last great surprise. Others see their death coming and fight it, hating every step they make along the dark road.

I brushed off earth and broken clay shards from a flowerpot crushed by his struggles. He strained my arms but I hauled him up on my shoulder as he tried to speak.

 _"Mei,"_ he said, and stopped when the blood leaked from his mouth. Then,  _"Mei."_  His eyes turned to a crushed rose in the scattered earth. Bloody lips moved. His last breath sighed out:  _"Huaaaaaa."_

And what was he trying to say, hmm? There are a hundred dialects in Hong Kong, and any other town in China. Learn one, and you still won't understand them – not their language, not their obscure feuds, and not themselves either. This place is a mystery.

But ah! the smokes and scents of this place draw us in, and the teas, and the sloe-eyed perfumed women.

 _"Schma Y'israel,"_ I began, not knowing the gods he worshipped.  _"Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echod._ " He did not understand me. I let him rest.

The dark narrow street, so empty five minutes ago, was filling with people, silent and round-faced, most in the dark blue garb of servants, all culled from the cheap tenements around us. One, a  _bumbo_ porter, unshipped his long bamboo portage pole from his shoulder, and I saw the moonlight glint off eyes and hints of scavenged knives. I put a hand on the revolver in my peacoat. It was time to go.

 

_A little from the middle_

 

I rapped a battered guinea against the dark scratched wood of the table. There was a pearl necklace there, and a bundle of silk flowers on the table – wherever I go, business finds me. The air of the night club was thick with white smoke and the murmur of other people's dealings. A singer, neatly packed into a figure-hugging  _qipao_ , crooned something about love and loss to the tune of "Apple Blossom Time".

" _Mei,"_  I muttered to myself.  _"Mei. Mei mei mei..."_  I missed the Chinaman, Tou. He knew  _everything_  about Hong Kong, everything except how to keep his mouth shut. And he was a good boy. I'd encountered him some months before, on a furlough in the port. My ship runs anything in bulk – timber or undressed hides, coal, comic books, and camphor. There is always room for small, valuable cargoes shipped in the captain's cabin, and I had been pursuing (believe it) 'magic wishing joss sticks' on behalf of a private client in New York when I ran into the boy, who was so manifestly anxious not to talk about them that I knew he was involved. Somehow.

The family that was said to have made them had been destroyed in a flamboyant fashion. I understood a lone survivor's motives in trying to hide, if that was what he was.  _Mei mei mei..._

"You have little sister?" It was the singer. Even in the dark her pancake makeup did not cover the wrinkles about her mouth and eyes, or the wattle starting to hang on her soft throat. But her eyes were kind.

"Eh?" I said eloquently.

"Your little sister. Your  _meimei._  You get presents?" She pointed to the necklace and artificial flowers and her black eyes smiled. "Good brother."

I set a flower in her smoothly coiled black hair. She lifted her hand to cover mine where it lingered by her face and said "Thank you for  _mei hua._ "

I frowned

 _"Mei hua,"_  she said. " 'Beautiful rose.' "

Ah.

A cold breeze cut through the fug of smoke in the room when the door opened and a pleasant-faced little round young man stood in the door, outlined briefly in a shimmer of street lights. He met my eyes and made his way among the little round tables towards me. The singer watched him, her face as impassive as the face of a  _Kuan Yin_  statue. I felt her hand tighten on mine and then drop and, as he came closer, she swayed briskly back to the stage.

"Captain Lindermeyer?" he said pleasantly. "This insignificant person is Li Daran. Does the honourable captain have time to discuss business with this insignificant person's family?"

I shrugged and nodded. I had seen the man around, a little, and business is business. We nattered a little, over a consignment of softwoods to be transported from the mainland. At the end I shook his hand, bland, friendly, and smiling. As his black sleeve fell back I saw a tiny spot of red on the white cuff of his shirt sleeve. "I was scratched by a thorn," he explained, smiling, "plucking the blood red roses oh."

And with that he bowed and left. I was filled with the ineffable, murky, and aggravating intimation that something of import had happened here, but then, in this town I often do. 

 

_The end is near_

 

Never you mind what I was doing in the House of Jade Stalk and Lotus. Arrangements were being made. Actions set in motion. Business settled.

But in the bar downstairs I heard some of the girls talking, about a room no-one could use, because it had become inhabited by a demon, which was terrifying in its own right and also the eldritch wailing was driving off custom.

There are strange things in the mysterious East, but my money was on it being just a cat. To settle the bet I tramped upstairs with the revolver in my pocket ready to hand and the mistress of the house and a crowd of spectators from the bar creeping behind me.

And so help me, there was the Chinaman's name scrawled on a tag on the door.  _Tou_ , written with the sign for peach. He'd shown it to me once, drawing it in beer with his cheeks flushed red from the spirits. This time it was written with another name, the whole surrounded in more chicken-scratchings in shaky vermilion writing. I shrugged, and put it in my pocket.

I pounded on the door.

Quiet.

The mistress handed me the key, and the door swung open into the Chinaman's digs. It was dark and fuggy, a magpie's nest of stolen gewgaws and fabrics. There was an ornate chair of some kind of ebony, and sitting in it was a large tangle-haired doll draped in brocade, but both were damaged – the chair sat on a crate instead of half its legs, and the doll had wretched burns high on its face. Unsaleable goods. The reek of male cat was strong in the room, I noted with a certain amount of satisfaction, and when my eyes adjusted I saw a silver-grey beast with lines like a Siamese lurking at the foot of the chair. It yowled, deep and resonant with a streak of crazy warbling at the top of the sound. You know Siamese. You don't? Well they're all mad. Enough to scare thirty demons away.

I'd won the bet. I wanted to look round Tou's room, though, so I offered a round for the house with my winnings and the witnesses began to melt away.

Then the doll opened its eyes. They showed white and pearly – as mad as the cat's, perhaps, and they looked right at me. Behind me I heard a grown man whimper.

"Two sides of the mountain," the doll – the girl - said in a wispy voice, her English perfect and clear. "Is it a tragic death? Is it the final initiation of an adept? I cannot see anymore." She scratched sparks from a flint and steel in her hands, and lit a lamp underneath some kind of contraption.

It was an incense burner, and as the incense blocks began to warm a  _scent_ filled the room, a musk, sensuous and yet pure, like warm clean skin, or ripe peaches on the tree, or the ocean on a clear day with the steamer making a good rate of knots or – no, I cannot describe it.

"What happened to my brother, Captain Lindermeyer?" she said. And I did not know what to answer.

Behind me a merry young voice cried "Found!" very happily and a sap crashed into the back of my head.

When I came to I was on my side on the dusty floor, fighting off a sneeze and the urge to vomit. That  _smell_  was in my head, ringing like a bell. I heard very clearly someone whisper, " _Duibuqi."_   _I apologise._ I heard the shutters open, and a powerful wind blow inside.

And so help me when I looked up from the floor I saw an angel, white-winged, regard me coolly with violet eyes. He gathered the burned girl into his arms, cradling her head on his shoulder and picked up a red leather book with one awkward hand. A sound broke from my throat as the angel leapt from the window.

The other man in the room, who I could not see clearly, ran to the window. Shots were fired. I saw the angel shot in the arm, and something fall. I don't know what happened next. Someone kicked me in the head.

 

_A little bit after_

 

I was at the Li family compound the next week, bowing to the elderly patriarch as I finalised our business dealings. Somewhere in the crowd of bowing, smiling people – for they are very polite, the Chinese – I saw my contact, young Li Daran, the eldest son of the Li family, very well put together in a brocade coat with a high collar which almost covered the raking scratches on his chin and throat, which looked to have been made by a large and vicious cat.

I said nothing. What's to say? Because in the ranks of the servants, soberly clad in blue, was the little burned girl, carefully holding a tray of sweetmeats.

How she got there? What Li Daran was doing? I don't know. It's a mystery.

And that's the story regarding this book, young Mr Glasscastle. I've never been able to open it, but it has fine workmanship on the cover – see the inlay of the golden lion guarding the lock? Oh, how I got my hands on it in particular? Don't you worry about that. It's a mystery.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Schma Y'israel, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echod_ This was the closest transliteration I could get from my source. He says it translates to "Hear O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is one" – something to say over a dying person.
> 
>  _Bumbo_ \- Again, transliterated from a native source, so there are probably disagreements with my spelling but, you know what, transliterating foreign languages is problematic to start with. A porter, with a long bamboo pole for carrying people's baggage. Probably the 'Bumboy' of the card game Bumboy/Arsehole/Chinese Last Card.
> 
>  _Qipao_ \- Sometimes called a "banner dress" (don't know why) or a cheongsam. Used to be quite loose. From the 1920s and 30s on, there was a fashion for cutting it fairly full around the bust, narrow about the waist and hips, with a straight skirt (often slit at the side), giving the slinky silhouette Westerners are more familiar with.
> 
>  _Kuan Yin_ \- Asian goddess of mercy, or Buddhist boddhisattva, or a glorious mix of both.


End file.
